Mitt Romney, Job “Destroyer”?

The fact that Mitt Romney now has the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination in his grasp, in a year that would seem to be tailor-made for someone like him, must be at least slightly bittersweet for him these days. Barring some major surprise, this campaign will be about the economy. And yet Romney’s economic experience is proving not to be an asset, but a target painted big and red on his back.

With a pair of videos that it released today—one a television ad, one a Web video—along with a new Web site, RomneyEconomics.com, the President’s reëlection campaign showed again that it plans to make Romney’s record heading up Bain Capital a centerpiece of its strategy for attacking him.

The ad and the Web video (which is just a longer version of the ad) focus on GST Steel, a plant taken over by Bain, where workers lost jobs and pension money even before the company eventually went bankrupt. They’re essentially not that different from attacks made by Romney’s primary opponents, like the lengthy “documentary” about Romney’s time at Bain released by a pro-Gingrich Super PAC. Still, the material is affecting.

Already, though, some people are saying the video isn’t fair to Romney—and they are making some good points, even if in doing so they’re missing the forest for the trees.

Steven Rattner, who served as the Obama Administration’s auto czar, is one of the people who has criticized the ad. On “Morning Joe,” he said,

I think the ad is unfair. I think—look, Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created a hundred thousand jobs. Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create a hundred thousand jobs or some other number. It was to make profits for his investors, most of whom were pension funds, endowments, and foundations. And it did it superbly, acting within the rules and very responsibly and was a leading firm. So I do think to pick out an example of somebody who lost their job unfortunately, this is part of capitalism. This is part of life. And I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about.

Let’s be honest: given the state of the U.S. economy right now, the Obama campaign probably would have been putting out ads like this no matter what Romney had said. But this isn’t just about free enterprise and capitalism, and we shouldn’t brush off the “Mitt Romney made a mistake” part as quickly as Rattner did. Romney practically invited this line of attack, and he won’t be able to get out of it just by telling the truth, which is that he was ultimately responsible only to his investors. As Ryan Lizza wrote earlier this year:

Romney made a major mistake in the way he chose to describe his professional experiences. Instead of simply emphasizing that he was a turnaround expert, someone whose managerial skills and business competence would help fix everything, Romney insisted that his great achievement in life has been creating jobs—specifically, 100,000 jobs while at Bain. As The Wall Street Journal and others have now made clear, “creating jobs” was never a metric that Bain used to define success, and, frankly, is not a metric that any company uses to define success. Independent fact-checkers have declared Romney’s 100,000 figure somewhere between phony and unverifiable. It is now one of the most important claims of this campaign for journalists to substantiate. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Romney’s success depends on whether that job-creation statement withstands scrutiny.

The Romney campaign is responding as best as it can, with a video that touts Bain’s record with another steel company it helped start, which remains in business today:

On its own, this sort of thing might work for the presumptive Republican nominee. As things stand now, though, Romney’s stuck fighting Obama on ground very much of the President’s choosing.

Similarly, at The Corner, a blog on the National Review’s Web site, Patrick Brennan points out that dozens of other steel companies went bankrupt around the time that GST did. (Additionally, it’s worth noting that Romney had left Bain two years before GST filed for Chapter 11.) That’s true, but it won’t save Romney from his own error. If anything, it might ultimately make it worse: saying Romney’s company was just part of the trend that killed the American steel industry helps him how, exactly?

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.